Midnight

The various film and TV awards ceremonies so far this year have been a predictable round; there have been few surprising winners, and the events both on-stage and off have largely been well-behaved and respectable. All hail, then, to the Grammys, which has managed to take conventional expectations of what an awards show should be and has subverted them considerably, combining everything from a transcendental comeback by one of music’s greatest stars to one of the night’s winners being dragged off by police in handcuffs. First things first though: the Grammys represented yet another victory for Taylor Swift, a woman who, at this rate, is going to become TIME’s person of the year for a second year in a row.

"Every single song is like a road map to what that relationship stood for, with little markers that maybe everyone won't know, but there are things that were little nuances of the relationship, little hints,” Taylor Swift told Yahoo! Music in 2010. A decade of songwriting turned those “little hints” into complicated numerology, a scarf metaphor at the centerpiece of her canon, coded song titles, storytelling scattered with cardigan sweaters, Shakespeare references, faded blue jeans, true crime, YA tropes (e.g., witches, cats, prom dresses, teen love triangles and evil alter-egos) and glitter-glue covered diary pages — sealed with red lips. Taylor Swift was fifteen when she began incorporating easter eggs and (wink-wink) secret messages into her work.

The recent downfall and shaming of Kanye West was likely to have been greeted with schadenfreude by at least one 32-year-old pop star. In 2009, West interrupted Taylor Swift's winning best female video at the MTV Video Music Awards to inform her that the gong should have gone to Beyoncé instead. Their relationship ever since has been a gossip-friendly roundabout of fallout, reconciliation, sniping and bitching. West’s current defenestration from public life, owing to antisemitic comments he made, has not been publicly alluded to by Swift yet. But the lyrics from the song "Karma" on her new album Midnights might make tacit reference to their ongoing feud, as Swift castigates an anonymous man for "talking shit/For the hell of it/Addicted to betrayal but you're relevant.